For I say unto you in all sadness of conviction that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone -- when you have felt around you are a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and despair have trusted to your own unshaken will -- then only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought -- the subtle rapture of postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army. And if this joy should not be yours, still it is only thus you can know that you have done what lay in you to do -- can say that you have lived, and be ready for the end.

You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at least he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.

Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Ea

The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience.

Lester Bangs

Success in life is a matter not so much of talent as of concentration and perseverance.

C. W. Wendte

If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

Thomas Carlyle

He who enjoys doing and enjoys what he has done is happy.

Johann von Goethe

Some girls are just born with glitter in their veins.

Paris Hilton

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

James Wolcott

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'

Friedrich Nietzsche

Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.

John le Carre

Experience. The wisdom that enables us to recognize in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

Ambrose Bierce